[FR]Add host benchmarks in documents

Features
1

The Raspberry Pis are very expensive now. In China, the price of RPi doubled, a 4B board with 8GB RAM costd almost 1200 CNY. More and more klipper users are buying and using some cheaper development boards like OrangePi, or using some outdated set-top boxs and pcdn devices. Most of these devices using Allwinner, Rockchip and Amlogic SOCs, and these performance may weaker than Raspberry Pi’s. So, listing some SOCs and their benchmarks in documents may help us choose a good host.

2

While I can fully understand your point, I do not think that this should be part of the Klipper project:

  • All across the web, you will find hundreds of benchmarks for various boards from dedicated benchmark sites
  • The number of boards are just too big to have them covered
  • Given the development rate of such boards, Klipper documentation can never keep up with it

Apart from the points above, it also depends heavily on your usage scenario:

  • Klipper alone can run on a 1st generation Raspberry Pi Zero
  • Adding Octoprint will be too much for a Pi Zero
  • Using the more modern UIs like Mainsail or Fluidd might be possible on a Zero
  • Adding a webcam will significantly increase the hardware demands
  • Adding further service like telegramm bots etc. even more so

Now we come to the final topic, the Linux distributions:

  • Raspberry Pi has a very solid Linux support, so all things like UART, I2C, SPI are well documented and working
  • The installation scripts of Klipper typically rely on Debian like distributions, so any other package manager needs manual installation, which requires Linux admin knowledge
  • Other boards have varying degrees of Linux maturity, so you may run into all sorts of unexpected topics, again depending on your usage scenario, e.g. SPI for an ADXL345 on Orange Pi seems not so straight forward (see Setting up ADXL345 on orange pi lite 2 - #5 by rafik)

Users are invited and encouraged to share their experience and knowledge with other types of SBCs here but I do not think this can be part of the main project. Any recommendation that is put into the official documentation would have to be tested, validated and maintained.

3

If you just go by some benchmark results, check GadgetVersus, here you can easily get some idea on the performance of various SBC processors.

For example, Broadcom BCM2837B0 (RPi 3) versus a RK3328:

Or Broadcom BCM2837B0 vs Allwinner H6: